LED illumination control is often accomplished by the modification of existing illumination control systems largely developed for AC incandescent lamps or similar devices. Such systems can have relatively complicated command structures and modalities.
An example of an existing digital interface for illumination control system is the Digital Addressable Lighting Interface (DALI), which typically uses a two-byte command having an address byte and a control byte. The data rate is typically 1200 bits per second. The control byte can have one of 512 different values, each representing distinct operations. Such digital interfaces can require several commands to accomplish relatively simple LED illumination control.